LTE-advanced based handover mechanism for natural disaster situations

Abstract

Abstract-Telecommunication networks often face power outage problems in the natural disaster affected areas. Also, owing to a sudden substantial increase in network traffic loads the battery backup power of the base stations run out quickly and therefore hampering telecommunication services. To overcome this system performance issues, we propose a Long Term Evolution (LTE)-Advanced (LTE-A)-based user equipment (UE)-controlled and base station (Evolved Node B or eNB)-assisted handover scheme. The idea is to limit the arrival of new traffic to an already overloaded eNB by diverting their handover to lightly loaded nearby eNBs. The novelty of this work is the ability of an UE to self-detect the occurrence of a natural disaster and to self-select the most suitable target eNB (TeNB) to handover with in the disaster affected areas. The handover is performed by obtaining the weighted average score (WAS) of the direction of motion (DoM) and the leftover battery backup power of the different neighboring eNBs (NeNB). The UE also predicts its DoM and dynamically adjust the weights of the two parameters if it's a disaster situation. Preliminary simulation results show that the scheme can offer up to 65% handover success rate in disaster situations.Keywords-natural disaster, seamless handover, leftover power, base station, LTE-A, weighted average score, movement prediction

Post-Disaster Communications: Enabling Technologies, Architectures, and Open Challenges

“…Authors in [196] devised an LTE-advanced (LTE-A) userequipment-controlled and BS-assisted handover scheme to prolong the network's autonomy. Ref.…”

Performance analysis of handover parameter for natural disaster in LTE-A network

“…However, the battery lifetime is still unresolved. In continuity to solve on battery backup, paper [19] and [20] proposed a handover scheme where UE selecting the appropriate base station according to the weighted averaging of scores for each base station based on leftover power of base stations at the emergency area and the users distance of motion relative to a base station parameters. The proposed scheme has benefit whereby the user selects individual scores to the different base stations according to the two parameters, counts the overall weighted averaging of scores for each and lastly chooses the target base station for the handover activity.…”

“…This paper investigates the continuity of the paper [19] and [20] which identify the parameter of distance of motion that can limit the new traffic to the affected base stations and hence, it can prolong…”

A survey of strategies for communication networks to protect against large-scale natural disasters

“…The first solution to this problem is the one described in [43], where the authors propose a mechanism for off-loading traffic to lightly loaded neighbours, thereby increasing both handover success rate and leftover power. A User Equipment (UE) controlled and Base Station assisted process is described to allow handover of equipment calls to lighter loaded base stations in a disaster scenario.…”